Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Monday January 18, 2010 @04:01PM
from the ouch-an-idea dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Although many historians are skeptical of the story, Rev. William Stukeley, a physician, cleric, and prominent antiquarian, wrote that he was once enjoying afternoon tea with Sir Isaac Newton amid the Woolsthorpe apple trees when the mathematician reminisced that he was just in the same situation as when the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasioned by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. The original version of the story of Sir Isaac Newton and the falling apple first appeared in Stukeley's 1752 biography, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life. Now BBC reports that UK's Royal Society has converted the fragile manuscript into an electronic book, which anybody with internet access will now be able to read and decide for themselves. 'The story of Newton and the apple, which had gradually become debunked over the years. It is now clear, it is based on a conversation between Newton and Stukeley,' says Martin Kemp, emeritus professor of the history of art at Oxford University's Trinity College. 'We needn't believe that the apple hit his head, but sitting in the orchard and seeing the apple fall triggered that work. It was a chance event that got him engaged with something he might have otherwise have shelved.'"

Names of companies and branded products are usually capitalized anyway, title or not.

Yeah, but consider that Apple sells computers whose file systems are case-insensitive. So even if you distinguish "apple falling" from "Apple falling", Apple's lawyers probably won't.

(This fact has sufficed to exclude Apple servers for several projects that I've worked on. We decided it was OK to develop stuff on OS X, but porting stuff to OS X from any other system can be full of gotchas because of file-name confusion.

Gravity is just the scientific way of saying the planet sucks. Newton was trying to avoid the plague at the time, which is why he was in his country home, if I'm not mistaken./The first sentence was sarcasm//The second is just a random fact///No, I did not look it up.

It just struck me, and yes this is completely off topic, that we should have a "Troll Feeding" mod, cause this guy isn't really a troll, but he is definatly feeding them. ah well, just my random thought for the day

A lot of times, the truth isn't relevant. We have made many heroes in society, and we didn't do it for them: We did it for ourselves. A lot of people we call heroes don't deserve it. Many of them didn't do anything at all. For example, United Airlines Flight 93: We have o objective proof of any kind that the passengers staged any kind of revolt, save a vague phone call. But we deified them into heroes after the tragedy as a symbol of hope. It doesn't matter whether the story is true or not. We needed something to symbolize strength and found it there.

It doesn't matter if the Apple hit Newton on the head or not. What matters is that it is a colorful story that explains the spirit of scientific discovery. It's the same with Einstein -- how many different ways has popular culture misattributed his discovery of the theory of relativity, or attributed a quote to Einstein that was really by somebody else (or made up). The story of Einstein endures as much because of his scientific achievement as because of popular culture stories that give people hope. Specifically, the hope that if they are smart and study hard, they can achieve great things. Today's sociological research rejects the contention that intelligence has any real bearing on success -- success is a combination of factors, of which intelligence can sometimes help a person.

We use stories and heroes in scientific literature the same as in any other: To convey our values. As far as I'm concerned, the Apple hit Newton on the head--even if it didn't.

Money and fame? In science? WTF you been smoking? Most scientists get paid fuck all, work long hours, and even the top ones in their field are mostly unknown to most everyone but their others that work in the same field.

Well Einstein’s relativity already fucked it up pretty good. In a relative universe, there is little absolute truth.
But only in duet with Heisenberg was it finally a FUBAR of epic proportions. Now truth is only whatever you look at. And since everyone is standing at a different relative point in spacetime, everyone sees everything differently.;)

Without us constantly ignoring that all we know is interpreted by our brain, after being processed by our senses, after mostly coming out of a second or even

This might not be a popular observation in some circles, but there is a certain brand of religious sentiment rooted in separation disorder and potential collapse of the boundaries of self. In this tent, god functions as an auxiliary shoring pole. Somehow, despite insuperable odds against this, some of us manage to function without one.

Without us constantly ignoring that all we know... defined through its relativity, is [not] in any way related to any "truth", we would go completely and utterly crazy...

Actually we do have evidence that the passengers of flight 93 tried to break into the cockpit, namely the flight recorders record the hijackers discussing the revolt.

We don't know who may have been trying to break into the cockpit, only that there were signs of a struggle on the other side of the door. For all we know, the passengers could have been fighting amongst themselves. There's no way for anyone to know what really happened on the other side of that door. But every one of them, whether they did something or not, was declared a hero and there are plaques all over the country listing their names.

Wow, I didn't resort to childish insults, but you alas you lack such maturity. Why would the hijackers make up something like that? For giggles? Why would they crash the plane before reaching their target? For kicks? By your standard of "proof" we cannot prove anything because there were not witnesses. There aren't witnesses to a lot of plane crashes and yet we can figure out what happened. Ditto for murders.

By the way, you oh so conveniently switched your argument from the passengers as a group(an

You've got the story all wrong. While it's true that the hijackers, not the passengers, downed that flight, there's plenty of evidence (from the flight recorder and elsewhere) that they did it because the passengers were trying to retake the plane.

And it's a good thing that people have their example, because passengers resisting the terrorists for fear of their lives is what has stopped every attempted terrorist after them. Sure, their bombs probably wouldn't work, but lucky for us, the passengers made su

Exactly. Only two changes post 9/11 have significantly increased airplane security. One is that passengers are now aware that they should resist hijackers (or other possible terrorists, like somebody licking their shoelaces on fire), and the reinforced cockpit doors. We change pretty much every else back to pre-9/11 standards and we save a ton of money, and reduce aggravation by a very significant amount, with virtually no decrease in actual security.

And it's a good thing that people have their example, because passengers resisting the terrorists for fear of their lives is what has stopped every attempted terrorist after them. Sure, their bombs probably wouldn't work, but lucky for us, the passengers made sure they didn't have much time to work on them. That alone is far more helpful than all the crazy scanners and useless rules we've added since then.

Exactly! Apart from basic baggage scanning to make sure there are no bombs, we really just need to m

girlintraining [slashdot.org], you are my hero. Actually, you're not, but that's irrelevant, the point is that I could have predicted 99% of the posts in this thread, but your post was refreshingly different, it gives me hope that living in denial is not such a bad thing as long as believing in fairy tales has some positive effect on society.

Interesting, isn't it, how close those two definitions are to each other.

By "close", you mean different. Axioms are chosen because they have useful properties in forming a set of mathematics that we are interested in.

No one is required to believe an axiom to be true - in fact, this is clearly not the case, as we can take different axioms, and build different mathematical systems from them. It's no more a "belief" than me choosing what colour t-shirt I'm going to wear to

While science does try to minimize axioms, it requires a belief in an objective material universe about which observations can be accurately made and reported, even second- or third-hand. Some philosophers would question the existence of objective reality. And the unreliability of eyewitness observations, much less hearsay, is known to many lawyers.

So not at all like religion, which doesn't inquire, and doesnt answer those questions.

The histories of some religions are full of inquiry -- Thomas Aquinas in Catholicism comes to mind. And most religions answer fundamental questions. Now, they may have been doing the inquiry in a way that's not back by empirical reasoning ("I was wondering about XYZ, so I looked it up in the Bible, and I prayed really hard") and so get answers that are wrong ("God did it"), but religion most definitely can feature inquiry

Axioms in mathematics vary, but here [wikipedia.org] are the most common. It's a while since I studied this, but the first one means (I think), "starting from zero, and counting upwards, we will never again get zero". The second one means something roughly like "for all x and all y, if the successor of x (i.e. x+1) is equal to the successor of y (i.e. y+1) then x is equal to y".

Axioms don't require proofs, but they do require a strict (and preferably

Okay, well, when you stop believing that the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees

I don't believe that. In the 19th Century, mathematicians constructed non-Euclidean geometries [wikipedia.org], and those work out just fine.

I only believe that the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees given those certain initial axioms of Euclidean geometry. But nowhere do I believe those axioms are true. In terms of mathematics, there is no need for us to believe any one set of axioms to be true. In terms of the physical universe

Not really. Axioms are assumptions. You can move back and forth freely between sets of assumptions, something you can't do with beliefs. Yes, people do change their beliefs, but it's generally a slow and difficult process, whereas a mathematician might move between the axioms of Euclidean and hyperbolic geometry several times in an hour.

(Unlucky is the land that has no heroes....unlucky is the land that needs heroes". Sadly, the fact that the US has such a need of heroes points to something wrong in the US psyche. I have sometimes felt that the US need for heroes derives, in fact, from a fear caused by the lack of social security and medical security in the US. Social democracies like Sweden do

I would also add that sociological research says no such thing, and I challenge you to produce a list of reputable papers that suggest that IQ is not correlated with income or social class, other than popsci books.

How about the American Psychological Association...

"The validity of IQ as a predictor of job performance is above zero for all work studied to date, but varies with the type of job and across different studies, ranging from 0.2 to 0.6." Source [wikipedia.org]... "The American Psychological Association's report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns states that other individual characteristics such as interpersonal skills, aspects of personality etc. are probably of equal or greater importance."

Yes, like when you don't care about something. This is a story that talks about whether something actually happened. The truth matters in such a case.

It doesn't matter if the Apple hit Newton on the head or not. What matters is that it is a colorful story that explains the spirit of scientific discovery.

There are lots of wonderful, "colorful" stories in history. We don't need to make them up to have examples of "the spirit of scientific discovery."

It's the same with Einstein -- how many different ways has popular culture misattributed his discovery of the theory of relativity, or attributed a quote to Einstein that was really by somebody else (or made up).

Lots. But if I want to know what Einstein actually thought about something, I want to know whether he actually said it. That's a matter of history.

The story of Einstein endures as much because of his scientific achievement as because of popular culture stories that give people hope. Specifically, the hope that if they are smart and study hard, they can achieve great things.

I can understand "It doesn't really matter if an apple hit him on the head or not, so let's stop trying to decide if it really happened".

But I'm not so sure about "It doesn't really matter if an apple hit him on the head or not, so let's claim it to be true". The argument about stories sounds worryingly close to the "They're just stories, honest" arguments made when religious people make claims about things being true, when we have no evidence for them.

I've suspected you were Melinda Gates for some time now, but this is the first time I have been unable to uncover any direct evidience. Is it true that a computer fell on Bill's head and inspired him to discover the GUI and pay someone to write Windows?

If you web search for the text, you will find it quoted in various web pages and books (not all recent).

You're right, e.g., this page [sussex.ac.uk] seems to have the whole text of the book. However, (a) it is kind of cool to see it so directly, as written by one of Newton's contemporaries, and (b) very few people probably know about it. I'm a physics teacher, and I've been telling people for years that the story was probably true because Newton's niece remembered him telling it to her. I'd never heard that Stukeley als

I agree that it's interesting to read the manuscript, I enjoyed looking at it. I agree that it's interesting to think about the Newton's apple story. But I think the way the BBC describes the project is simply misleading. They write:

"The UK's Royal Society converted the fragile manuscript into an electronic book, which anybody with internet access will now be able to read."

Saying "will now be able to read" implies that we were not able to read it before. That's just not true. Yes, we can see the imag

Hey man, just cause you're not reading them, doesn't mean they aren't being written. You also seem to think that writing is a zero-sum game: that the more is blogged, the less is published in a more permanent fashion. It just ain't so: today's blog is often just a more sharable and immediate addition to lab notes. The phrase is still "publish or perish", not "post or perish".

Man the rumors on this new force thing are really ramping up leading up to Apple's expected event at the end of the month. I've heard some people claim that it is a whole new force while others are just complaining "aww... it's just another form of the same old electromagnetism we've seen."

Whatever it is, Apple doesn't disappoint very often. I've heard speculation that they'll be calling it "iGravity" or something similar. Now this headline is saying that it will go online somehow. I can't wait!

It would have been a coconut and he would have been killed when it hit his head. No theory of gravity.

Although it is true that falling coconuts kill more people every year than sharks, it is not clear why you think Newton was hit on the head by an apple.

The text makes it obvious he was seeing an apple fall (probably more than one if he really sat in an orchard for any length of time. It's fairly rare that we have an opportunity to observe a freely falling object from a distance, and orchards are excellent